Asking friends, colleagues, or other trusted people to
help answer a question or find information is a familiar and tried-and-true
concept. Widespread use of online social networks has made social information
seeking easier, and has provided researchers with opportunities to beter observe
this process. In this paper, we relate question answering to tie strength, a
metric drawn from sociology describing how close a friendship is.

We present a study evaluating the role of tie strength in question
answers. We used previous research on tie strength in social media to generate
tie strength information between participants and their answering friends, and
asked them for feedback about the value of answers across several dimensions.
While sociological studies have indicated that weak ties are able to provide
better information, our findings are significant in that weak ties do not have
this effect, and stronger ties (close friends) provide a subtle increase in
information that contributes more to participants’ overall knowledge, and is
less likely to have been seen before.